Marvel had been laying out clues about the monumentally shocking ending for Avengers: Infinity War for months, and no one noticed!

Thanos snaps his fingers in Avengers: Infinity War. It wasn’t just a metaphor.

This post contains spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War

In the second trailer for Avengers: Infinity War, released in March, we hear Zoe Saldana’s Gamora talk about her adoptive father in a rather ominous tone. “The entire time I knew him, he only ever had one goal, to wipe out half the universe. If he gets all the Infinity Stones, he can do it with the snap of his fingers,” she says, “Just like that.”

And just as Gamora demonstrates what she has said with a snap of her own fingers, we immediately cut to Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark, who says, with a concerned look on his face, “Tell me his name again.”

“Thanos,” says Gamora. Thanos, played by Josh Brolin in the film, the formidable foe the Avengers have been dreading for half-a-dozen movies. And now, he has finally arrived on Earth in search of the six Infinity Stones, whose power when combined can make the owner the most powerful being in the universe.

Having seen the film, we now know that while this exchange is cut together from two different scenes - Gamora is talking to Thor and Tony is at Doctor Strange’s residence - it’s also super prescient about the film’s ending.

In the same trailer, we hear Thanos say, “When I’m done, half of humanity will still exist, perfectly balanced, as all things should be.”

A few weeks later, a TV spot for the film brought back Gamora’s warning, and another gave Thanos more time to monologue. “I could snap my fingers, and you’d all cease to exist,” he said.

Those of you who’ve seen Avengers: Infinity War - and if you’re reading this, you should have - would know that snap his fingers is exactly what Thanos does at the end of the movie. And by snapping his fingers, he eviscerates half the population of the universe, and with it, Bucky Barnes, Drax, Groot, Mantis, Wanda Maximoff, Peter Parker, Peter Quill, Doctor Strange, T’Challa, and Falcon.

This is another example of Infinity War being extremely faithful to the comics. Written by Thanos’ creator, Jim Starlin, and drawn by George Pérez and Ron Lim, the iconic Infinity Gauntlet run of Marvel comics opens with Thanos murdering half the universe’s population with a snap of his fingers.

The superhero extravaganza has been hugely successful around the world, especially in India. It has made Rs 79 crore in two days at the Indian box office. The film will soon cross the coveted Rs 100 crore mark in the opening weekend itself. This is an unprecedented figure for a Hollywood movie in India and enough to make it the year’s biggest debut for any movie in the country, beating out the likes of Tiger Shroff’s Baaghi 2 and Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmaavat.